Shakespeare as it should be

The key to staging Shakespeare is modesty. When dealing with the finest words in our language, you should let them do the talking.

This observation might seem so obvious as to be trite, yet it escapes a surprising number of professionals. How often do we sit through performances where the director has interposed his ego between audience and text, ensuring that, wherever our seats are, we have an obstructed view.

Shakespeare’s corpus doesn’t need to be ‘made’ more contemporary or more relevant. It’s magic lies in its constant, uncanny pertinence. Whatever our circumstances, the words seem to address us privately. The same passage can speak to us in different ways at different moments in our life. Precisely how this happens, I still don’t understand; but, if you know the plays, you’ll know what I mean.

A wise director, appreciating this property, lets the works breathe. He doesn’t corset them in some theory of his own. He doesn’t simplify them or ignore their contradictions. That’s not to say that he shouldn’t be innovative. On the contrary, a good director needs the imaginative power, the largeness of spirit, to be worthy of his subject matter. He ought to be an original thinker who is prepared to subordinate his genius to a greater.

That same combination of talent and humility is required from the production designer. We need an artist of the first rank who understands that he is fashioning a setting for a priceless gem, not an ornament to be admired in itself. We don’t demand doublets and togas; but we want the background to complement and compliment, not distract.

The same goes too, of course, for the actors. However talented they be, however celebrated, they are in the presence of something larger. Consider, to pluck a recent example, Simon Russell Beale’s Falstaff in the BBC screening of Henry IV earlier this month. Falstaff is one of the four Shakespearean roles (along with Hamlet, Cleopatra and Iago) which A.C. Bradley considered ‘inexhausible’, and Beale played it accordingly. The result was wonderful. ‘I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men,’ says the old knight; and so he was.

Not even the greatest actors can be relied on to take the same approach. In a Nicholas Hytner production in 2005, I had hoped, along with many theatre-goers, to see something approaching the definitive Falstaff from Michael Gambon: a titan by any standard, and one of my all-time favourite performers. Sadly – though most critics were too reverential to say so – Sir Michael decided to impose his personality on Sir John’s, playing lines for easy laughs and smirking at the audience.

Where do we find a company of modest geniuses? Whose productions most reliably meet these demanding criteria? At the moment, I’d say Edward Hall’s all-male troupe, Propeller, whose 2011-2012 season closed on Saturday at the Hampstead Theatre with Henry V and The Winter’s Tale.

Both works can tempt directors into error. To play Henry V as a patriotic pageant is almost as wrongheaded as playing it – currently the fashion – as an anti-war tract. It is both and neither: the compounding of heroic and horrific lines is as neat an example as we could ask of Shakespeare’s constructive ambiguity – what Keats called his ‘negative capability’.

W.B. Yeats was awed by the character of the king:

Henry has the gross vices, the coarse nerves, of one who is to rule among violent people, and he is so little ‘too friendly' to his friends that he bundles them out of the door when their time is over. He is as remorseless and undistinguished as some natural force, and the finest thing in the play is the way his old companions fall out of it broken-hearted or on their way to the gallows

Remorseless and undistinguished, but not entirely undoubting, which is why there is such power in his prayer on the eve of battle, in which he effectively concedes the weakness of his claim:

Not to-day, O Lord, O, not to-day, think not upon the fault My father made in compassing the crown!

The same ambiguity informs Shakespeare’s view of the English character. The soldiers we see trooping across the stage – quarrelsome, loyal, drunk, stoical, brave, uncouth, uncomplaining – are immediately recognisable. An English audience, seeing itself, cheers patriotically even while flinching from the violence.

Propeller played the English soldiery as somewhere between modern squaddies and football hooligans: an apt way to convey the spirit of the text. It’s not the first company to have done so: I remember the RSC doing something similar in its awesome Millennial staging of eight history plays, This England. Propeller’s production worked, as that one had, because the director treated the audience as adults, because the setting enhanced the lines, and because the actors were superb.

The same was true of that picaresque and disturbing play, The Winter’s Tale. Again, there are so many challenges: the visual ways to contrast the Bohemian and Sicilian sections of the play, which fall open like two halves of a book; how to stage madness without psycho-babble; how to play the most famous stage direction in the entire canon: ‘Exit, Pursued by a bear’. Propeller pulled it all off, even managing to present the rustic scenes as a sort of Glastonbury festival without becoming twee.

What’s their secret? The director, Edward Hall, is brilliant. The actors are extraordinarily versatile – most of them being impressive musicians, too. They don’t really go in for gimmicks – unless you consider having an all-male team of 13, as Shakespeare himself had, a gimmick. Above all, though, they let the author speak for himself.

Such words, in the mouths of actors who appreciate cadence, are like magic spells. Towards the end of his life, Goethe was so enthralled by them that he no longer wanted to watch the plays, simply to hear the lines recited as poetry.

There’s a line from the Winter’s Tale – again, an incidental one – which comes into my head whenever I look at a meadow at this time of year and which, somewhat absurdly, moves me almost to tears:

Here's flowers for you: Hot lavender, mints, savoury, marjoram; The marigold, that goes to bed wi'th’sun And with him rises weeping.

Such material, properly delivered, exalts the actor rather than the other way around.

I’ve remarked before that, if my hits didn’t fall by 80 per cent when I blog about Shakespeare, I’d write of little else. But one of the pleasures of having a blog is that you can indulge yourself, so I’m going to do so one more time by thanking the university friend with whom I watched the two plays on Saturday, and who first introduced me to Propeller. Duncan is an amateur actor and a great Shakespearean – so great, indeed, that, a few years ago, the RSC recognised his long devotion by inviting him appear on stage in a non-speaking role in Twelfth Night. If, as I hope, this article encourages anyone to discover Propeller, you’ll indirectly have him to thank.